Books

14 February 2007

A fantastic how-to and reference for interface design. Well stocked with images and illustrations. The layout is beautiful and functional. It's incredibly easy to quickly find what you need in here.

Designing Interfaces is a good primer, but it's also a great reference. Shoot through the book for a quick understanding of how different interfaces work and what their design patterns are. Then keep it handy when interface discussions come up.

I've already recommended it to four people who've already purchased it and a few more are on the way.

The protagonist of this book has no idea what he is, his parents are a mountain and a washing machine, his brothers include a psychic, an undead malcontent and symbiotic stacking dolls. He keeps trying to live a normal life, but his family won't let him. Despite his bizarreness, he can at least walk down the street without too much trouble. This is different from a woman he befriends whose bizarreness is so noticeable that she needs to saw off parts of her body on a regular basis.

Ultimately this book deals with issues that any iconoclast or counter-culture denizen will recognize. While the characters issues are weirder-than-life, they all span the gap of the social outcast - wanting to live in the mainstream world, resenting the mainstream world, observing the mainstream world ... but never quite being a part of it.

Cory is an easy read. The book flows nicely. Characters are interesting, plot twists are well executed. Even though I've only given this 3 stars, I likely be reading more Cory Doctorow in the future.

01 January 2007

In 2006 I wanted to read 52 books in 52 weeks. I did that and a little better. So, I'm pretty happy with that. I thought I'd run down what my favorites were and what inspiration I received from them and other books this year.

I broke them out into categories. I'm surprised to find the list of science books beating out business and web theory books.

Fiction

This year I started reading one book by Philip K. Dick per month, just because it seemed like a patently ridiculous thing to do. No Philip K. Dick books are on my list. Go figure.

I totally loved this book, I must have read it in all of an hour. It's a very short, very poignant book that managed to push all my sappy buttons. I had Vivian read it immediately after I finished it. I find it a very patient book, wry and knowing.

In the end, this book is about the value of all life, even our own. And while we may not want to die, we have no real way of ever measuring our actual impact. It's hard to put ourselves in perspective.

This book is a major reason not to shop at Amazon a lot. I was down at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Seattle and this was on the new releases shelf. I paged through it a bit, put it down, went to leave and walked back into the store to buy it. "You forgot to buy me..."

This is a collection of short stories, and I hate short stories. It's also Yu's first book. I was immediately struck with the tone he used with his characters - it reminded me immediately of Vonnegut. Calm, understanding, patient. Even though his stories are very short, the characters are well developed and conceptualized.

Sometimes his stories are in a bizarre environment - such as one where superheros are fairly common and getting in as a superhero is a bureaucratic process. The main character has a fairly uninspiring ability that - you can tell - could be used well, if he wasn't uninspired in general. Others are more common settings.

No one can make me sit down and read 1,000 pages like Orson Scott Card. He's utterly magic. I read Xenocide, all 800 pages of it, in Hong Kong when I had nearly no time to read -- in four days. The same was true for Ender's Shadow, which I read over a weekend back in Seattle.

Card, especially in the later books, goes long for the ethical dilemmas. He explores the boundaries of self-interest, race relations, religion, science, politics, war, and so on. In programming, the conditions that don't quite fit the way we wanted the software to work (and therefore breaks it) are called boundary conditions. Card seems to find all of life's boundary conditions.

Which sounds like it would be plodding and a total bore to read. But, somehow, he makes it flow like water. The man is a total freak of nature.

Since writing Emergence, Steven Johnson has proven himself to be a popular blogger and an author of other wildly popular books. As an urban planner turned software developer, Johnson's parallels between the emergent natures of cities and of software hit home for me. He places those discussions in a context of social, biological and political emergence that also parallels well with the work I'm doing with cooperation.

The key here is that coherent patterns emerge from complex or seemingly random systems. Those coherent patterns are what we often recognize and act on or, conversely, discount - depending entirely on point of view.

You were upset about being reduced to a number? Well Seife is gonna reduce you to a probability! In Decoding the Universe cryptography, physics, astronomy, biology and a cat supercollide and the resulting reaction describes how the universe works, how you think, and how everything is going to implode after an inexorable march toward oblivion - which we are about half way done with.

Decoding the Universe is a phenomenal trip down reductionistic lane. It was a wonderful companion to the Dalai Lama's Universe in a Single Atom, which I'll review under spirituality.

Written before the massive surge in oil prices, Natural Capitalism discusses how prudent environmental practices are good for a capitalistic society. Hawken provides details of the cost benefit analyses surrounding the use of green materials and practices.

Hawken received much fame from this book, propelling him to a recognized world leader in thoughtful enterprise and development. I saw his new, yet unreleased, book the other day and was only able to get a glance of it. I'm looking forward to getting a copy soon.

The Dalai Lama is a wise and thoughtful man who has been blessed by the opportunity to have long discussions with both spiritual and scientific leaders. In Universe in a Single Atom he shows movements in modern science that very closely map to historic teachings in Buddhism. At the same time, he shows how religion can sometimes blind people of both spirituality or beneficial science.

This book is an excellent example of how to simultaneously contrast two viewpoints and show their similarities. An utterly fascinating read.

Ambient Findability is about how we, as people, make sense out of our environment. Wayfinding and Mapping are part of my daily life. Morville helped me extend my thinking of them even further. My copy of this is littered with notes on nearly every page. Whether I was arguing or agreeing with Morville, every page had something to think about. This is a short, well written, colorful book that is a must read for every urban planner, sociologist, psychologist, software developer, geographer, librarian or (other).

You'll notice a lot of these books have been out for a while, this one is no different. But I wasn't anticipating what I found inside. Hock's book is told in a very Persig-esque fashion with narrative interspersed with philosophy.

The book tells the story of how Hock helped create VISA, the organization largely responsible for every monetary transaction on this planet. VISA was built by banks who were very power hungry - so VISA had to be an organization that would never bow to anyone's direct power and yet have no actual power of its own.

Hock calls this a Chaordic organization. Chaord is the boundary line between chaos and order. Visa had to be ordered enough to get the job done, yet lack the power associated with traditional order. It had to have that element of chaos that came along through mob-rule by all the individual participating banks.

This book turns management theory on its head - and gives real success story examples of the applications of its theory.

I should note that when looking for new recipe idea I, of course, turn to the net. I have FoodNetwork in my search bar and make good use of it.

The sheer mass of recipes and cooking information on the net makes The Barbeque Bible all the more special. I bought it at the cook shop up the street because it had this great stuffed standing roast recipe and had good tips on technique.

When I got it home and started to read it, I was floored by the depth of this book. Usually books called The <Random Subject> Bible fall short of the mark. This is certainly an exception. Raichlen will tell you about all BBQ techniques, give you amazing recipes and extend your appreciation for both gas and charcoal grilling.

18 December 2006

My goal this year was to read 52 books in 52 weeks. I have reached that goal with 2 weeks to spare. So I may get some bonus books in there. With all the other demands on my time, that's certainly the most I can hope for. So, patting myself on the back for setting a goal and actually achieving it in 2006.

12 September 2006

Reviewing The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Normally I have a one sentence, one paragraph, one page review. But this one wants to be more free-form.

The 48 Laws of Power details 48 individual laws of coercive power. How to obtain it, how to hold it, how to avoid being hurt by it. The overarching rule of power - that it corrupts - is never directly mentioned but is apparent. Greene provides amazing examples of history's masters of power. Napoleon, Catherine, Qin, etc.

One seriously can't stop reading this book.

But, for me, it caused a sort of recursive introspection that haunted me for days. I was constantly thinking of past events. What the power dynamics were. What I did wrong. Who was the victor. What the lasting damage was. What could be written off.

That's exhausting!

The good news is that, historically, I've done pretty well. When I was impertinent, I was not beheaded. When I was overeager, I was not exiled. I have not been imprisoned or had my wax wings burned. I haven't been drug through the streets or forced to live as a slave.

But I have overly applied power when I've had it, been burned by others when they've weilded theirs, and not played political games with skill and cunning. I have lost friends and overly rewarded those who wished me ill. I have been slow to identify malice.

16 July 2006

Note: This is a long post that is continued here. It is the second of my mindmap series.

Why do people hate Microsoft? Why do people seem increasingly impatient? Why do people build up companies and then rip them down?

This is what I am pondering in this week's mind map. It may be that as we move further into the digital age, the closer to light speed information becomes. As we experience this we surpass the Tofflerian Information Overload and actually go into something akin to rapid information aging.

I started down this path due to a few ponder points.

Old Books - I was looking for books in Amazon and was discounting some because they were written more than 3 years ago. As if the important stuff has just risen to the top recently. Is this techno-hubris? No, I don't think so, I think it's because information becomes misplaced so quickly in our current age, simply due to its abundance, that 3 years ago seems like 25. But the calendar, that's some pretty recent writing. But because I am receiving information an nearly light speed, when I notice it again it seems old.

Microsoft - Why can't they dig their way out of their PR hole? Why is Google rapidly losing their consumer good will? Well, I not only receive information faster now, I receive stuff faster as well. Ask Friendster about brand loyalty. Three years ago, they were MySpace. One day they weren't cool any more. MySpace was. Friendster had millions of subscribers in what was thought to be the stickiest of on-line applications -- social networking. Then it all went away. Microsoft is a bit stickier, as they have desktop applications that are expensive to replace. But, as much as I hate Writely, Writely, wikis and blogging show that the desktop application market - while never replaced - will soon rely on how it integrates with external web based applications and not on their market share. Hint to Open Office or Novell - wanna kill Word? Integrate blogging, wikis and file sharing into your apps (by Christmas 2006).

These thoughts raised a lot of issues about brand loyalty, product quality, information overload, the speed of change, sustainability and on and on. I have pulled this all into this mind map.

05 July 2006

Hooray, a great time sink for Jim .. I have over 1000 books in my stacks at home.

Now comes Library Thing. I have spent the last several minutes (luckily it let me search by author so that made book adding easy for a completist like me) adding a tiny bit of my books in. It has some blog widgets I'll explore tonight.

But for now you can see that I think of Vonnegut, Solzhenitsyn, and Huxley.

I'll add more as I get time. I'm making it a sick, twisted goal to put everything in. But it'll be hard. Much of my Solzhenitsyn collection was out of print, as was some Huxley.